Hard to make a fair judgment here.

One the one hand, you have beleaguered passengers. Airline service used to be quite elegant. No extra charges for baggage, that was all included in the price of the ticket, as were meals on the plane. And the meals were often fairly posh. The first time I flew in a commercial airliner (DC-6B, from Seattle to Denver) in 1955, it was filet mignon, baked potato with all the fixin's (butter, sour cream, bacon bits), a green vegetable, dessert (chocolate cake) and coffee, cocktail if you so wished. Complementary snacks, drinks (alcoholic and other wise), and a couple of very polite stewardesses.

On one flight, from San Francisco back to Seattle, I was one of only six passengers on a United 727. The stewardess didn't have much to do, and she had all these little single-serving bottles of booze. She seemed to take a liking to me (saw my guitar go into the coat closet so she might have thought I was somebody) and kept plying me with Manhattans which I kept drinking. I flew back to Seattle at 39,000 feet. The plane, however, was flying at 35,000 feet! That was a happy flight.

The last time I flew, there was none of that. A small package of macadamia nuts (five of them, and they were stale) and when I got my wheelchair back, it had been damaged in the luggage compartment. Bent frame because they had crammed it in with all the other luggage. After a long discussion with a supervisor at the airport where I landed, the airline agreed to pay for repairs. Fortunately the chair was still usable on my trip, but it tended to go a bit sideways, like a crab.

Within recent years, I've had better, more polite service riding the Greyhound!

I have a friend, retired college professor who travels around the country a lot, and to England once a year, to deliver lectures on theater arts. He has some real horror stories about his adventures (battles) with various airlines.

Now, some of them are even charging you to use the john!!

So I don't blame a passenger for losing it on occasion. I just about lost it when an airline charged me to take my guitar into the passenger cabin with me instead of checking it through with the luggage (see "United Breaks Guitars" on YouTube). They generally put it in the coat closet, but this time I had to buy a seat for it! Child's fare, but nevertheless!

But—

On the various day jobs I've worked:   at the Boeing Airplane Company, I worked under five different supervisors at various times. Two of them were certified, ordained sadists, one of whom started picking on me specifically after I won a company "Pride in Excellence" award for a project I had worked on. Another gave me a lot of s**t for taking time off to attend my father's funeral (I had oodles of sick leave backed up, but I was not actually physically sick, you see!). Other things.

And then there was a radio station where I worked as an on-the-air announcer, a newscaster, wrote commercial copy and then produced commercials, and wound up working from 6:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. with no lunch breaks. When I got off work, I was too tired to eat, so on the way home, I grabbed a hamburger at a local drive-in before I fell into bed. I was loosing weight. Finally, I complained to the station manager, who kept saddling me with extra duties around the station. His response to my wanting a lunch hour? He ignored it and told me that I wasn't "pulling my weight" around the station!

I made a few phone calls, then two weeks later, I quit, returning to Seattle, where I stepped into a job at a classical music station—under AFTRA contract. I worked six hours a day, got to play music that I liked instead of the "elevator music" at the previous station, and got paid AFTRA wages! Hah!!

When I worked as a telephone operator (Ma Bell), you were supposed to be polite to all customers, no matter how abusive they got. You could get static for taking too long processing a call (taking more than 25 seconds with each customer), but you could also be charged with an "error" by being too abrupt with a customer. A survey I read at the time listed "telephone operator" as as the most stressful job, due to company demands and supervisory pressure. "Air flight controller" was also on the list. If one of them screws up, hundreds of people could die! They were number 2 on the list!

On one job (technical writer), when other people in the office went out to local restaurants for lunch, I elected to bring a sack lunch to save a bit of money. So since I was staying at my desk, I got saddled with answering the phones for everybody. And then, other people started leaving me little odd jobs to do while they were out to lunch. So I started leaving the office during the lunch hour and taking my sack lunch to a nearby park. The office manager seemed to think that because I wanted a lunch hour like him and all my other co-workers, I was somehow "shirking my duties!" Shades of the radio station!

(You're familiar with the term "chutzpah?" ["ch" pronounced in the back of the throat like the "ch" in the German "ach"]   Generally means "shameless, unmitigated gall," but is best defined in terms of situation. Family comes into a fancy restaurant. Waiter brings water and passes out menus. Head of the family hands the menus back, brings out a big picnic basket and starts passing out food to the others. The waiter, flummoxed, goes and tells the head waiter what's going on. The head waiter stalks over to the table, about to throw the whole bunch of them out, when the head of the family glowers at him and asks, "Waiter! Why is there no music!??" Or the teenager who murders his parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he is an orphan!)

There have definitely been times when I would have loved to given someone a terminal wedgie, then grabbed a beer and "took a slider!"

So--hard to be judgmental either way.

Don Firth